Netflix's Fast.com speed test service was initially designed to just measure download speeds, and specifically on Netflix servers at that. Since it launched last year, the site has had over half a billion speed tests performed, the company said. Now, Netflix is expanding the site's features to make it much more similar to Ookla's speedtest.net, which is by far the most popular such service. To boot, it has removed the "Compare with Speedtest.net results" link that used to be there after a speed test was performed. Now, users can view both upload speeds as well as latency. Latency is the time it takes for a packet of data to do a round-trip between a server and the client accessing it. In a way, Fast.com now goes further than speedtest.net, showing users how much data was consumed during the test, something the latter does not do by default. Read: Netflix: Lots of potential in India, "we're way behind YouTube and Hotstar" Netflix peering in India With these latency measures, incidentally, it becomes much easier for Netflix subscribers in India to see if their ISP has an Open Connect Appliance — a sort of last-mile content server the company uses to manage data load. Since Netflix uses the same servers as its service for fast.com, the speeds are indicative of a device's quality of connectivity to Netflix. The lower a subscriber's latency, the higher the probability that their ISP has an OCA, or is peered with an Internet exchange that Netflix is partnered…
